St. Paul Pioneer Press tech blog by Julio Ojeda-Zapata

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St. Paul Pioneer Press tech blog by Julio Ojeda-Zapata

Space Weather and BeforeNow: cool apps, local roots

I’ve come across a couple of interesting mobile apps with local roots.

Space Weather

Minneapolis developer Timothy Stewart has created yet another weather app, with a twist: It’s a space-weather app. Yep, it’s called Space Weather.

The Windows Phone app isn’t new. It launched in 2011, but has recently been updated for the shiny-new Windows Phone 8 operating system.

Much of the app is gibberish to me (some nerd, I am), so I’ll let the developer explain what Space Weather is and does:

Space Weather is an application that reports current and forecasted space weather information on and around planet Earth. Upon opening the app, users are presented with current space weather, space weather over the last 24 hours, and the space weather forecast. They also see a list of the last space weather alerts, charts and graphs of different space weather indices, and explore other mediums like RSS news feeds, images, and even movies!

BeforeNow

Minneapolis developer Travis Read has created BeforeNow, an iPad app for creating a timeline of personal events – in the past as well as up to one year in the future.

Such milestones can be organized by category and festooned with pictures, maps, friend tags and more. Timelines can then be printed and/or exported to PDF, Evernote, Dropbox or iBooks.

The app, first released in 2012, has seen recent updates.

Read notes:

The ability to print a users timeline was one of our most requested features. It helps complete the loop of what a user can do with their data. Some users wanted to bring the data to a doctors appointment, others just want to share their memories with family. We were thrilled to see people using BeforeNow in ways we hadn’t ever thought of! The imagination of our users continues to excite us and shows the importance of having the app be as ﬂexible as possible.